Jessie Pope
| birth_place = Leicester, East Midlands, UK | death_date = December | death_place = Devon, UK | nationality = English | period = First World War | genre = War poem | notableworks = | website = }} Jessie Pope (18 March 1868 – 14 December 1941) was an English poet, prose writer, and journalist, who remains best known for her patriotic motivational poems published during World War I.'"Minds at War'" the Poetry and Experience of the First world War', David Roberts, Saxon Books, 1996, ISBN 0-9528969-0-7 Wilfred Owen directed his 1917 poem Dulce et Decorum Est at Pope, whose literary reputation has faded into relative obscurity as those of war poets such as Owen and Siegfried Sassoon have grown.Jessie Pope: the Daily Mail's favourite first world war poet. Lindesay Irvine, The Guardian. Tuesday 11 November 2008 Early life/ career Born in Leicester, she was educated at North London Collegiate School. She was a regular contributor to Punch, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express, also writing for Vanity Fair,Songs of Good Fighting, Eugene Richard White & Harry Persons Taber, Elkin Mathews, 1908 Pall Mall MagazineReviews and magazines, The Times, 1 December 1910 and the Windsor.Reviews and magazines, The Times, 1 May 1912 Prose editor A lesser-known literary contribution was Pope's discovery of Robert Tressell's novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, when his daughter mentioned the manuscript to her after his death. Pope recommended it to her publisher, who commissioned her to abridge it before publication. This, a partial bowdlerisation, moulded it to a standard working-class tragedy while greatly downgrading its socialist political content.The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell, introduction by Peter Miles, Oxford World's Classics, OUP, 2005, Google Books Verse Other works include Paper Pellets (1907), an anthology of humorous verse.[https://archive.org/details/paperpelletshumo00popeiala Paper Pellets], Internet Archive She also wrote verses for children's books, such as The Cat Scouts (Blackie, 1912) and the following eulogy to her friend, Bertram Fletcher Robinson (published in the Daily Express on Saturday 26 January 1907): War poetry Pope's war poetry was originally published in The Daily Mail; it encouraged enlistment and handed a white feather to youths who would not join the colours. Nowadays, this poetry is considered to be jingoistic,Jon Stallworthy "Owen, Wilfred (Edward Salter)", The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, Ian Hamilton, Oxford University Press, 1996.Women's Poetry of the First World War, Nosheen Khan, University Press of Kentucky, 1988, ISBN 0-8131-1677-5 consisting of simple rhythms and rhyme schemes, with extensive use of rhetorical questions to persuade (and sometimes pressure) young men to join the war. This extract from Who's for the Game? is typical in style: Other poems, such as The Call (1915)[http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/topic_1_05/jpope_call.htm The Call], Norton Anthology of English Literature – "Who’s for the trench – Are you, my laddie?" – expressed similar sentiments. Pope was widely published during the war, apart from newspaper publication producing three volumes: Jessie Pope's War Poems (1915), More War Poems (1915) and Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times (1916).The Works of Wilfred Owen, Wilfred Owen, ed. Douglas Kerr, Wordsworth Editions, 1994, ISBN 1-85326-423-7 Criticism Her treatment of the subject is markedly in stark contrast to the anti-war stance of soldier poets such as Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Many of these men found her work distasteful, Owen in particular. His poem Dulce et Decorum Est was a direct response to her writing, originally dedicated "To Jessie Pope etc.". A later draft amended this as "To a certain Poetess", later being removed completely to turn the poem into a general reproach on anyone sympathetic to the war.The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-school Ethos, Peter Parker, Constable, 1987 In hindsight, Pope's poetry seems to take a light-hearted approach towards a conflict nowadays considered brutal in the extreme, though her views were by no means atypical of the general public at the time. Pope is prominently remembered first for her pro-war poetry, but also as a representative of homefront female propagandists such as Mrs Humphry Ward, May Wedderburn Cannan, Emma Orczy, and entertainers such as Vesta Tilley.Michael Duffy. Women and WWI: Feminist and Non-Feminist Women: Between Collaboration and Pacifist Resistance, 25 February 2006 In particular, the poem "War Girls", similar in structure to her pro-war poetry, states how "No longer caged and penned up/They're going to keep their end up/Until the khaki soldier boys come marching back". Though largely unknown at the time, the War poets like Nichols, Sassoon and Owen, as well as later writers such as Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and Richard Aldington, have come to define the experience of the First World War.For the creation of the modern image of World War I see Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford University Press, (2000) ISBN 0-19-513331-5 Reappraisal Pope's work is today often presented in schools and anthologies as a counterpoint to the work of the War Poets, a comparison by which her pro-war work suffers both technically and politically. Some writers have attempted a partial re-appraisal of her work as an early pioneer of English women in the workforce, while still critical of both the content and artistic merit of her war poetry. Reminded that Pope was primarily a humourist and writer of light verse, her success in publishing and journalism during the pre-war era, when she was described as the "foremost woman humourist" of her day has been overshadowed by her propagandistic war poems. Her verse has been mined for sympathetic portrayals of the poor and powerless, of women urged to be strong and self-reliant.Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Jesse Pope. whatalovelywar.co.uk 23 January 2003.Jane Potter (2008) cites W. G. Bebbington, 'Jessie Pope and Wilfred Owen', Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 3/4 (1972), 82–93 Her portrayal of the Suffragettes in a pair of counterpointed 1909 poems makes a case both for and against their actions.'Any Woman to a Suffragette' and 'Any Suffragette to any Woman' from Airy Nothings (1909), cited in Jane Potter, 'Pope, Jessie (1868–1941)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Oct 2008 accessed 12 Nov 2008 Later life After the war, Pope continued to write, penning a short novel, poems—many of which continued to reflect upon the war and its aftermath—and books for children. She married a widower bank manager in 1929, when she was 61, and moved from London to Fritton, near Great Yarmouth. She died on 14 December 1941 in Devon.Jane Potter, 'Pope, Jessie (1868–1941)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Oct 2008 accessed 12 Nov 2008 See also *List of British poets References External links *[https://archive.org/details/jessiepopeswarpo00popeiala Jessie Pope's War Poems], Internet Archive *''Who's for the Game''? at WikiSource *Dulce et Decorum est, document f316r, Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive Category:1870 births Category:1941 deaths Category:English women poets Category:British World War I poets Category:People from Leicester Category:People educated at North London Collegiate School Category:20th-century poets Category:20th-century women writers Category:English-language poets Category:English poets Category:English women writers Category:Poets Category:Women poets